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Low Ranked Craig writes "Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes 'from a deep slumber' sometime around 2013. In a new warning, NASA said the super storm could hit like 'a bolt of lightning' and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world's health, emergency services, and national security — unless precautions are taken. Scientists believe damage could extend to everyday items such as home computers, iPods, and sat navs. 'We know it is coming but we don't know how bad it is going to be,' said Dr. Richard Fisher, the director of NASA's Heliophysics division. 'I believe we're on the threshold of a new era in which space weather can be as influential in our daily lives as ordinary terrestrial weather.' Fisher concludes. 'We take this very seriously indeed.'"

So would something like an EMP destroy pace makers, artificial hearts, etc.? I know the typical discussion is in regards to someone not being able to listen to their Jason Mraz album on their iPod, but would something like this essentially kill anyone with an artificial/bionic enhancement that controls life support?

So would something like an EMP destroy pace makers, artificial hearts, etc.? I know the typical discussion is in regards to someone not being able to listen to their Jason Mraz album on their iPod, but would something like this essentially kill anyone with an artificial/bionic enhancement that controls life support?

No. My titanium ribs act as a Faraday Cage and protect my electronic innards. So after the disaster happens.... I'LL BE BACK.

Pacemakers are installed inside a poorly constructed Faraday cage. That being your highly conductive body. Pacemakers historically have occasionally gotten all wound up in high RF fields, but aside from folks working at high power UHF TV station transmitters it has not been a serious issue.

You can "short out" and essentially blow the fuses of a pacemaker. Of course it takes more than enough power to hopelessly electrocute someone, in fact depending on the design you pretty much need to cook them like one of those electric hot dog cookers.

Its pretty much the usual useless scaremongering B.S.

would something like this essentially kill anyone with an artificial/bionic enhancement that controls life support?

Could something worse than we have ever experienced, result in deaths? Just speaking generally, not about any specific threat, and taking a wild guess, I'd say that's a good solid maybe, unless my salary depending on raising money by saying yes, in which case I'd say yes.

You're looking at it from a consumer perspective. The real problem is infrastructure.

I can buy a remarkable quantity and variety of food at my local weekly farmers market direct from the local farmers... I would assume that could scale up quite a bit if necessary.

I'm not belittling the other problems, just saying that is possible to buy food, in fact excellent locally grown food, beyond pizza rolls from a walmart supercenter. I/we can eat quite well indeed without making sam walton's heirs richer, or maki

Big transformers in the power grids will be the main victims. And all of us that rely on having a power grid, of course.
As long as you keep a spare car battery to recharge any bionics that require that, and provided that the outage doesn't last too long, I'd expect something like a pacemaker to be just fine.
GPS and cars are mentioned because its the satellites themselves that are vulnerable. The "ipods etc" stuff in the telegraph, assuming there's any reasoning behind their inclusion in the article at all

Big transformers in the power grids will be the main victims. And all of us that rely on having a power grid, of course.
As long as you keep a spare car battery to recharge any bionics that require that, and provided that the outage doesn't last too long, I'd expect something like a pacemaker to be just fine.

The issue you refer is to ground loop currents in the electric grid. The storm creates a difference in the ground voltage between different transformers. This creates a massive current that blows out the transformer.

The real issue is that the devices to prevent this (basically huge resistors) are expensive, rare, and take a long time to manufacture. And when we suddenly have half of the transformers in the US explode at once, the outage will not be brief. There is not a large stock of transformers sitting in warehouses as replacements. Transformers take even longer to produce than those resistors, and we would be waiting months before we could repair most of the grid. That's a huge issue.

Actually the electrical utilities were looking at stockpiling backup transformers, worried about roving bands of Al Qaeda or Neo-Nazi terrorists shooting up substations with deer rifles. The powers-that-be took one look at the price tag, saw their quarterly bonuses and yearly stock options evaporating, and nixed any sort of actual anti-terrorist preparation that went beyond window dressing. The reasoning seemed to be that if an attack caught them unprepared they'd just be fired and take their millions wit

The power transmission is three-phase power. So, at the common terminal of the transformer on each end of a long transmission line there should be zero net current. Under all normal circumstances there is.

In the event of a solar storm, there is a DC current flowing through the wire, which usually isn't present. This resistor would go between the common terminal and earth ground, and both reduce the current present in the line and dissip

I think they're saying exactly December 21, 2012, the Winter Solstice and end of the thirteenth b'ak'tun, the ending of the Great Year, the Age of Pisces, the Platonic Cycle, Barack Obama's first term.

I'm convinced that there are a lot of powerful (and not so powerful) interests are using "2012" as a tabula rasa onto which to draw their agendas. And I'm not just talking about crazy new agers.

The US intelligence service has been toying with manipulating belief systems since the end of WWII. They've looked at (and maybe used) the UFO phenomena, Egyptian mysticism, Christianity, parapsychology and of course, psychotropic drugs as ways to influence events around the world and here at home. I'm not saying they believe in these things, but that they believe they can use these things, or rather, that they can manipulate other peoples' belief in these things. MK-ULTRA, Project Monarch, astrology, Andrija Puharich and the "Council of Nine" (involving Arthur M. Young of Bell Helicopters and Lee Harvey Oswald's wife by the way) were some nascent efforts in this area, and "2012" may be their pièce de résistance.

There's just something that feels to me really manipulative about all this "2012" mishegas.

[I just realized I quoted Latin, French and Yiddish in this post, which while not my record, is pretty good for 8 o'clock on a tuesday morning.]

Working on the assumption that, in the contemporary west, "generation" means ~25 years, there have been pretty enormous changes in that time. In '85, a 386 fabbed on a 1.5 micrometer process was seriously exciting stuff. In 1960, the transistor was only 13 years old, and seriously retro(but electromagnetically robust) stuff like magnetic core memory was still standard. There were plenty of electric gadgets, though.

Protip: If TFA is found on the "telegraph.co.uk" domain, it almost certainly represents the state of knowledge of someone who majored in "journalism", after surviving an editor, rather than the state of knowledge of the actual scientists involved with the question...

More likely a result of bad journalism than bad science, but I suppose it could be both.

Anyway, here's the link to spaceweather.com for anyone who wants to learn a little about the sun, sunspots, etc. http://www.spaceweather.com/ [spaceweather.com]

Here's a link to the latest from NASA published about two weeks ago. Their take on sunspot cycle 24 as best I can translate it? They haven't a clue and won't for several years -- after they have a decent sampling of cycle 24 sunspots to work with. Right now the cycle is late to start and may be fairly weak... or not. http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml [nasa.gov]

Technically they can still be proven correct, no one knows when the suns next big fart is coming up (the shiny one, not the paper version, they shit crap out all the time:D - and are probably an even greater danger to society)

Anything that includes circuitry would be affected (destroyed) by magnetic storms from the sun. In 1859, telegraph wires visibly sparked across the United States due to a geomagnetic solar storm, the largest recorded in history. I just hope my phone in my pocket doesn't take my leg off.

Also, my computer is pretty much a large steel cage, with the magnetic platters encased in another thick layer of metal, how vulnerable would a regular tower be?

Simultaneously plugged into a multi-thousand mile grid of copper electrical power wiring and miles of aluminum hardline for the cablemodem, not so good.

Unplugged in a box, excellent chance of survival.

Also, electrical fields have no direct effect on magnetic material, you can completely vaporize the electronic of a computer in a lightning strike and a cleanroom service can install new circuit boards and recover most/all of the data off the drive. Now, heat the platters above the curie temperature, like in a fire, and you're screwed.

Unless you have a punchcard to jtag writer, documentation on your cd-rom drive, and of course backups of your bios, you're screwed anyways. Every electronic component you'd use to recover those backups probably has either an eeprom or flash part in it containing the device specific code. In the event of any sort of serious EM pulse that could damage hardware or wipe software you would either have lost or best case had minimally corrupted every device along the chain you'd use for recovery. This actually fal

And even if you have all that stuff - what about the tools to make the tools? Having all the documentation/drawings/plans/specifications/whatever to rebuild the reader for the media you've stored away is pretty much meaningless unless you can actually use all that data to actually build the reader.... And that equipment isn't trivial either.And it goes like that right down the technological chain. As I told a misguided survivalist type friend of mine back during the run-up to Y2k: "Living off the

I seriously wonder whether I should purchase a few crate-sized Farady cages in preparation, and ensure I have non-magnetic backups of everything.

You could build your own cheaply but it won't protect you from the power fluctuations, loss of communications and looting(tm)... Not to mention high energy particles chewing up your ipad and dna if it was a really real problem and not mostly bullshit...

Yes, definately. This is just a bit of/. exaggeration based off of uninformed telegraph exaggeration. We're not talking about setting off a nuke next to your PC. We are, however, talking about a problem that will require significant coordination to mitigate some potentially very nasty effects on a global / continental / national level.

... two mods who think this post is insightful, and two posts showing it is wrong, and still no one has figured out that this is a joke making fun of the global warming deniers... sigh, yup, which ever of these groups you side with the answer is the same: no one gets it and at this point we're pretty much screwed.

Definitely. The plan is to build a ship made out of unobtanium and fly it into the sun. Once it reaches the core some nukes will be detonated which will reverse the spin of the sun and avert this catastrophe.

Or NASa just saw the light and how public fear can me made into profit, using for example big pharma recipes...?

Whatever, only reasonable thing to do about it is to cool down and ignore as much as we can.

I don't get it. I mean I don't get why you were modded up. I myself might get modded down for saying this, but the quality of modding has gone down here on/.

Are you suggesting NASA is trying to scare us for profit? Are you bloody serious? If you took the time to read the literature, solar storms happen with a roughly well determined periodicity. No one is suggesting this is a world-ender but electronics are at risk; to just ignore it as a NASA conspiracy is amazingly irresponsible and completely ignor

It doesn't matter, we have electronic controls everywhere. If there's an EMP-level event from the Sun, any cars made since about 1970 will be rendered inoperable.

Why? The electronics are buried in fully enclosed little steel boxes, installed in big car sized fully enclosed steel boxes, with short wires designed not just to survive electrical sparks, but to control those electrical sparks. And none of the electrical wires are longer than a couple meters at most, and none of them connect outside the vehicle (the occasional winter time engine block heater excepted). The only things tougher than automotive electronics are diesel electric locomotive electronics and mi

From one of the links we learn that "..powergrids will temporary switch off some transformers, to save them from the effects..".What about our computers? Anyone here able to confirm that powered off electronics would not be damaged by the blast?

The effect is proportional to length of wire. We're talking about a hypothetical major solar event, potentially comparable to the one in 1859 [space.com]. As the effect will be proportional to the length of the conductor in question, the effect on your ~1m PC will be ~1000 times less than the effect on a ~1km power cable.

Why should we expect a worse sun spot maximum than previous maxima?Nowhere in the two linked articles does it say anything about why it would be worse than 2006.They don't even talk about the unusually long sun spot miminum we've had.I was hoping for some science about how that might affect the coming maximum...

The NASA article makes no claim that this solar maximum will be any worse than previous ones. Their point is that, due to the deep penetration of technology in our lives, our society is more sensitive than ever to peak solar activity, and so solar weather forecasting is now more important than ever.

Does it seem to anyone else that the telegraph routinely confuses "Something up to size X could hypothetically happen some day" with "X IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN!!!!"?

I'm not saying this is a bad topic to have a conversation about (in fact it's one of my favorite disaster scenarios to rant about), it's just that if slashdot is going to reference the telegraph, it should frame it as though a new Hollywood disaster movie has been released, not as though it was an actual news item was printed.

I worry about "Chicken Little" syndrome with space weather alerts. "GPS will die, sending airplanes crashing and sinking boats. Cell phones will fail, stranding travelers and resulting in people in remote areas dying due to exposure. Worse of all, our TV may go out for a few hours."

Only when the word is pronounced as a word, not a series of letters, i.e. USA, FBI, CIA are all caps but Nasa and Nato are not because you don't pronounce the letters. You're welcome to make your own version of our language just please don't call it English - it just leads to confusion and arguments. At the very least call it American English.